Re: A sad farewell

[Jay Daley <[e-mail]>]

Henrik, thank you for your long and immensely valuable contribution to the IETF tools.  Your hard work, prolific output and high quality code have been instrumental in getting the tools to where they are now.  

I often hear the criticism that the IETF is too focused on bespoke tools, but if we look at Datatracker, to name just one of many, and at how productive it has enabled the IETF to be, it’s clear that a strategy of community-led tools development has been a resounding success.  Thank you for being such a key part of that.

I also want to thank, rather belatedly, Netnod for their many years of funding some of the many hours Henrik has spent working on IETF tools.

Jay

> On 4/11/2020, at 3:42 AM, Henrik Levkowetz <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Dear friends and acquaintances,
> 
> After 20 years of writing tools for the IETF, I will let my contract for
> tools maintenance lapse at the end of the year, and move on to other things.
> The reason is the attitude of the current IETF Chair and LLC Board towards
> contractors in particular and IETF participants in general.  Care for the
> community doesn't seem to matter to them.
> 
> The current Chair and LLC Board seems to see contractors, including the
> secretariat and myself, not as members of the community, but simply someone
> who should do what they are told by the authority in charge.  This in total
> contrast with the approach of Russ Housley as IETF Chair; he explicitly
> tried to make the secretariat and other contractors an integral part of the
> community, inviting them in, rather than pushing them out.
> 
> Remembering how supportive the previous full Exec Dir, Ray Pelletier had
> been with respect to the tools work, I was hoping that things would change
> at the end of last year with Jay Daley; unfortunately it hasn't; rather the
> opposite, and it has simply become too painful to carry on.
> 
> Things got bad at the end of last year, when the LLC Board went back on their
> word after accepting my bid on the RFP in full without reservations; they
> simply changed the contract offered without one word of conversation about
> the changes.  My bid would have been substantially different for an RFP with
> the conditions in that contract.  That was tough, but the final straw came at
> the beginning of 2020, when a Tools Architecture and Strategy Team was
> established to look at the tools future, and I was excluded from it.  Being
> considered a replaceable cog and not a part of the community is not a fun
> environment in which to work, and I've been depressed for most of the year
> following that.
> 
> The consequence is, as indicated above, that I  will not sign on to any
> contract renewal or bid on any new RFP when the current term runs out for
> the tools maintenance contract at the end of the year.
> 
> Many and big thanks are due to all the IETF chairs who have supported and
> encouraged my tools work: Harald Alvestrand, Brian Carpenter, Russ Housley,
> and Jari Arkko.  Huge appreciation and gratitude also goes to Robert Sparks
> and Russ Housley for the privilege of working with them in the Tools Team
> and the TMC (Tools Management Committee).  And finally, thanks to all the
> members of the community who over the years have made it a joy to do tools
> work, by expressing their appreciation of the tools.
> 
> ----------
> 
> The longer story, for background, to explain how I came to feel so strongly
> about being excluded from tools architecture work and having the LLC Board
> go back on their word without even thinking it was worth talking to me about
> it:
> 
> I wrote my first draft of a draft in 1999; my first meeting was IETF 49.
> 
> In 2001, Sami Vaarala and I both presented drafts outlining NAT traversal
> for Mobile IP, and based on the way we worked to merge these and build
> consensus, I became co-chair of MIP4, a position I held till the group was
> closed in 2015 (although there was essentially no activity during the last
> 5 years).
> 
> I early thought it absolutely silly that in the internet age, IETF documents
> were not available as HTML documents with internal and external links.  That
> led to rfcmarkup (2002), which was deployed to provide htmlized versions of
> RFCs, and later drafts, first on my own domain, and later on tools.ietf.org.
> 
> As I was writing drafts, I was annoyed with having to manually check the format
> requirements (line length, boilerplate, and whatnot), and adapted an awk
> snipped as a 10-line script to check line length for me (2003).  That grew,
> and became 'idnits'.
> 
> Having to read new revisions of drafts, to keep up with other Mobile IP
> contributions, I found it annoying not to know where the changes in the new
> rev were, and how much was changed.  This led to 'rfcdiff' (2003).
> 
> As WG co-chairs, we had to put together a summary of the status of the various
> documents before each meeting -- that status report was the main way to let
> participants know about draft progress, since there was no datatracker in
> 2000, and no WG support in the IESG tracker tool when it appeared.  Doing the
> summary each meeting was very much drudge work, and becoming tired of repeating
> the exercise each meeting, I created a document status page for MIP4, updated
> automatically from various text files available from the draft repository and
> the IESG tracker (around 2004).  Other chairs saw this, and asked me to do the
> same for them, and it grew from there, and was eventually incorporated into the
> official datatracker as WG pages.
> 
> Around late 2006/early 2007, serious SQL injection vulnerabilities were
> discovered in the datatracker as it was then.  After a lot of feet-dragging
> by the vendor in addressing the vulnerabilities, Bill Fenner and I started
> a skunk-works project to completely rewrite the publicly accessible datatracker
> from old-style Perl to Python and Django.  For 2 months we worked up to 10
> hours per day, and disclosed the effort only when we had enough in place to
> show that the effort was viable.  The powers that were applauded the effort,
> and we carried through, and released the rewrite in June 2007.
> 
> I continued to do tools work during 40%-50% of my time up till 2016, at no
> cost to the IETF -- all work and tools were donated by myself or my employer
> over the years.  In 2016 I was about to switch employers, and the IETF
> Chair and several previous chairs saw the opportunity to get me to work full
> time on IETF tools, which I happily did until the current chair started to
> seriously treat me not as a member of the community but as a contractor that
> needed to be told just what to do in early 2018.  After that, things went
> downhill.
> 
> As mentioned earlier, the final straw came early this year, when Alissa and
> Jay decided to set up a Tools Architecture and Strategy Team, and excluded
> me from that work.  That was to me such a clear and unequivocal statement
> of me not being considered part of the community that it drove me into a
> depression, from which I could only partially recover by distancing myself
> from the tools effort more and more.  The depression has gone in waves in
> the following months, often triggered by additional actions and statements
> showing the same attitude.
> 
> I don't know which attitude the next Chair will have, but even if it's more
> in line with earlier chairs, the LLC Board and Jay, who have been part of
> making this year a miserable one for me, will still be there, not much changed.
> 
> So it's not with joy I move on and look for other things to occupy me; it's
> with sadness in abandoning an area in which I've invested a lot of myself
> over the last 20 years.
> 
> My best wishes to you all going forward.
> 
> 
> 	Henrik
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[e-mail]